I looked out at the blue-green water. “Howard Mattingly was a second-string wing for the Chicago Black Hawks. He was killed early Saturday morning—run over by a car and left to die in a park on Chicago’s northwest side. He was up at the Soo on Friday. He fits the description of the guy Cappy flew back to Chicago. He exploded the depth charges on the Lucella—I watched him do it.”

Bledsoe turned to me and grabbed my arm in a gesture of spontaneous fury. “Goddammit—if you watched him do it, how come you haven’t said anything to anyone? I’ve been talking my head off to the FBI and the Corps of Engineers for two days and you—you’ve been sitting on this information.”

I twisted away from his grasp and spoke coldly. “I only realized after the fact what Mattingly had been doing. I didn’t recognize him immediately. As we went down to the bottom of the lock, he picked up what looked like an outsize pair of binoculars. They must have been the radio controls for the detonators. The whole thing only dawned on me after the Lucella had gone sky-high … You may recall that you were in shock. You weren’t in any position to listen to anyone say anything. I thought I’d better leave and see if I could track him down.”

“But later. Why didn’t you talk to the police later?”

“Ah. That was because, when I got to the airport at Sault Ste. Marie, I found Mattingly had gone back to Chicago on your airplane, presumably under your orders. That really upset me—it made a mockery out of my judgment of your character. I wanted to talk to you about it first, before I told the police.”

The dog came bounding up to us, water spraying from its red-gold hair. It was an older dog—she sniffed at Martin with a white muzzle. The woman called to her and the dog bounded off again.

“And now?” he demanded.

“And now I’d like to know how Clayton Phillips came to be on the self-unloader of a ship you were leasing.”

He pounded the beach beside him. “You tell me, Vic. You’re the smart detective. You’re always turning up whenever there’s a crime about to be committed on my fleet … Unless you’ve decided that a man with my record is capable of anything—capable of destroying his own dreams, capable of murder?”

I ignored his last statement.

“Phillips has been missing since yesterday morning. Where were you yesterday morning?”

His eyes were dark spots of anger in his face. “How dare you?” he yelled.

“Martin: listen to me. The police are going to ask that and you’re going to have to answer.”